iOS 7.1.2 and Mavericks 10.9.4 Released – A preliminary look!

Apple released iOS 7.1.2 and Mavericks 10.9.4 a few hours ago. Once again, at least the iOS update appears to be untried and untested. There is also an update for Apple TV, 6.2, although I did not see anything new or different in the brief look I had after the update.

Those attempting to update iOS using iTunes might be out of luck as the update might get stuck after a while. The OTA update seems to work fine on a few devices that I tried.

WWDC 2014 – iOS 8, OS X 10.10 – Apple opens up iOS a bit more!

Well…Not a very exciting event from Apple, but, there are some points that could stretch Apple’s lead in the mobile and desktop market to some extent.

1. Apple has opened out more APIs on the iOS side allowing app functionality, officially, that was previously available only on jailbroken devices. Given the wide developer base, we could see some exciting apps coming up in the near future. iOS 8 Enterprise features have also been enhanced and could spur wider enterprise adoption.
2. The introduction of a new programming language, Swift, which could accelerate the development on iOS and OS X platforms far more than ever before.
3. The integration and extension of the functionality of the 10+ year old Nokia PC Suite into Yosemite is a welcome addition. Most people using iOS devices would probably understand that this could be quite useful on occasion. This page has details.

A word of caution for early adopters. Do not attempt to try iOS 8 just as yet on your primary phone. Most of the current applications will not work as expected and a vast majority would simply crash, including the stock apps. Yosemite, although usable, is quite laggy and slow, which is to be expected from a developer preview. The same applies to Xcode 6 beta.

iOS 6.1.2 out and jail-breakable

With the OTA update of iOS 6.1.2 weighing in at around 12 MB, it seems to be a very small change that was needed to fix the Exchange calendar bug and maybe some more stuff.

Hopefully now the push notifications start working as they used to…

The jail-break should be released within a day and should keep jail-breakers happy.

Personally, I only used to jail-break for gestures to close and switch between apps etc. Toggles were also useful at times as are photos in the contact list. Apple engineers have not been able to figure out how…so far…to implement these features that other phone have had for some time now. The whole idea is have a more visual look-n-feel and avoid using the mechanical buttons unless absolutely required.

Of course there is also the “thing” that Apple calls “maps”, which is probably the sickest tech joke of the century. Apple maps also make the once useful Apple apps like Find-my-Friends completely useless since there is no map. Of course, Google also helps a lot by not using it’s own maps in Latitude and not updating it for over a year. As with Latitude, Google has still to figure out as to how to get it’s maps onto the iPad.

Once Apple engineers figure out some of the basic stuff and how to implement it, I believe that the jail-break numbers would go down to almost nothing.